Birthday Fic: Why You Should Always Call Ahead
Title: Why You Should Always Call Ahead
Pairing: Kon/Tim
Summery: Kon is bored. It leads to problems.
A/N: For zenithjolt, from the Hobbit Birthday Batch (one more to go!) To be honest, I got a little off of the prompt, but I like to think that this is better. Also works for the #10 prompt of coldfiredragon’s cliché-a-thon.
Kon was bored, and even he knew that this could easily turn into an extremely dangerous situation.
Boredom had a habit of playing with Kon’s mind. It would convince him to do things that he knew were ridiculous, dangerous and just plain stupid. Boredom had convinced him to fly naked through thunderstorms, dive into live volcanoes for the hell of it and let Bart choose a movie.
And, possibly stupidest of all, boredom made him fly half-way across the country to Gotham City, risking the wrath of an angry Bat, just to get Robin to entertain him. Which was exactly what he was doing now, ducking in and out of the gargantuan gothic shadows, all of his concentration focused on finding Robin’s heartbeat in the mess that was Gotham.
Tim was nowhere to be found near the Manor, but then again, it was almost past dusk, so he was probably on patrol somewhere in town. Tim would be pretty annoyed at Kon for turning up during patrol, but as we said before, boredom had never made him a genius.
Kon hovered in the shadow of the Wayne Tech tower for a while, shifting through the sounds just the way that Clark had always tried to tell him to. He never quite understood how Clark got all the thoughts in his head under control enough to ‘clear’ them as quickly as Superman did, but after all, Kon was his clone and anything Clark could do, Kon should be able to as well.
Finally, he got a lock on a rhythm as familiar as his favorite song and followed it into the heart of the city - specifically, the seedy part that wasn’t actually called ‘The Red light District’ around here, but still totally was. Because he was no longer an immature teenager, Kon refrained from whistling at more than two of the girls lining the street as he flew past, and even managed to decline the kiss that one of them offered him after he carried an abusive client off to the nearest precinct.
For a moment, Kon wondered exactly what Tim was doing in this part of town, but quickly wrote that off as a stupid question. Tim was Robin, which meant that he was on patrol, duh. There must have been some kind of mess down here, and he was probably going to need help. This was a tough neighborhood.
The thought pushed him onward and Kon blocked out everything except Tim’s breathing and heartbeat. He would have tuned in his voice, too, but for some reason he was having trouble locking onto it. He could hear someone talking, but it was much too high to be Tim:
“Easy, honey, just take it easy and lie back. I promise, you won’t forget tonight for a long,
long time.”
Kon wrinkled his nose at that. Whoever this girl was, she couldn’t seriously be talking to Tim. Straight-laced, on the level, totally serious Tim, with a prostitute? No way. Just no way. He had to have the wrong voice.
“No, don’t open your eyes. You’ll ruin the surprise. I know, I know, you usually like to be in control, but this will be worth it. I promise.”
Tim’s heart rate dropped suddenly, slowing into the meditative, dangerous rhythm of a raging storm. Kon recognized that rhythm - it was something that the Bat had trained into all of them as a reaction to impending danger. It was what helped Tim keep calm under pressure, and it could only mean one thing - he was in trouble, some kind of trouble so bad that he couldn’t speak.
But it couldn’t be anything that Kon couldn’t help him with. Now if he could just get the girl next door to shut up…
“Just lie back and relax…”
Kon finally found just the right run-down apartment and burst through the window without a second thought. Nor did he have a third thought, or a fourth, or a fifth, because the moment he saw what the ‘danger’ was, his brain broke.
There was a man on the bed, a pencil-thin, greasy-looking blonde whose tacky pinstripe suit had been carefully folded over a chair beside the bed. He’d been stripped down to his boxers and was currently lying on his back, hands above his head in anticipation of what the half-dressed redhead straddling his waist was about to do. Said redhead bore a pair of bat-shaped handcuffs in one hand. some kind of radio in the other and a steady, slow heartbeat that Kon would recognize in his sleep.
Tim’s wide blue eyes stared at him from under the wig, absolutely horrified.
Superboy barely has time to take all of this in before the mobster reacted, throwing Tim off of him with one hand. “What the fuck-?!”
He grabbed a gun from the chair where he’d left his suit and fired a shot at Kon, which bounced off his TKK shield and shattered what was left of the window Superboy had entered through. In the same moment, Tim hit the mattress, dropped the radio to the floor and rolled back to his knees, bringing one hand down on the man’s neck in a sharp nerve strike.
As a result, just as Kon was starting to life into the air again to rush his attacker, the gangster’s eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped into unconsciousness.
Tim let out a deep breath, easing his heart out of the not-quite-meditative state. The wig fell off, revealing the black hair and the full intensity of his glare. “Kon-el, you have two seconds to explain just what the hell you’re doing here.”
“I, uh…” Kon was having a hard time getting his brain to work, especially now that he was greeted with the full-frontal view of the torn black blouse, loose red scarf and barely-there underwear that Tim was wearing, even if the Boy Wonder’s battle stance was carefully shifted to conceal his more private parts. “I just want…to hang out…”
Tim almost laughed at that. “You picked a hell of a time! In case you can’t tell, I’m in the middle of a job!”
“A job?!” A horrifying thought struck Kon like a bolt of lightning. “You weren’t actually going to-”
“No!” Tim’s face turned beat red and he busied himself with handcuffing the unconscious thug. “This creep’s the prime suspect in a serial murder case. He targets transvestite prostitutes, gets them to sleep with them, then pays them by strangling them to death. We’ve already got the proof, but this was the only way to catch him.”
“Oh…so you’re drawing him in…” Kon thought about that slowly, and it made a twisted sort of sense. “Wait, so Batman was using you as bait?!”
Tim rolled his eyes, crouching down to pick up his wig as through dressing in women’s clothing and pretending to solicit sex from a known murderer was a normal occurrence. “It was my idea.”
“Still, I can’t believe you’d…”
“Raid! Raid! Police! Look out!”
Robin swore under his breath, his eyes darting to the little radio - which had landed flat on it’s button. “Dammit! I wasn’t going to call them in until I got out of here!”
Kon glanced towards the inner wall and scanned through it with his x-ray vision. “I’d say you’ve got thirty seconds.”
“If that. Shit.” Tim yanked his wig on, letting it hang lopsidedly as he tossed open the chest at the foot of the bed. His Robin costume was there, folded neatly in a pile of Kevlar and polyurethane. “I can’t be seen like this.”
“Only one thing to do, then.”
Kon leaned over Tim’s back, reaching around him with both arms to grab Robin’s cape from the bottom of the costume pile. In one swift motion, he’d unfolded the cape, catching the rest of the suit in its wake, and wrapped it around Tim. The cape covered Tim from neck to knee, pinning his limbs together just enough to keep him from struggle as Superboy hosted the damsel in distress into his arms.
“Kon!” Tim exclaimed, fighting futilely with the thick cloth. “What are you doing?!”
“Call it protecting your honor,” Kon smirked, then kicked off into the air and darted out the window, just seconds before the police kicked down the bedroom door.
Once Kon was free of the red light district, he took off into the air and came to a hovering stop ten stories above the highest rooftop. Tim had wiggled his arms free from the cape by this time, and was now sitting in Superboy’s grip with his arms crossed and the wig falling over one eye to half-mask his disgruntled expression. “You are incorrigible.”
“You’re welcome.” Kon leered openly, using his TKK to brush the hair of the wig out of Tim’s face. “So…you done for the night?”
Tim’s face remained firmly twisted into his solemn scowl. “I still have patrol.”
“It can wait,” Kon said, and angled for a small motel just outside of town. “I think I want to get a better look at what that scumbag was so interested in.”
One of Tim’s eyebrows quirked curiously, and the corner of his mouth turned up in a cocky smirk. “What, are you jealous?”
“Damn straight,” Kon tightened his grip and grabbed Tim by the back of his head, pressing their lips together fiercely. Tim made a muffled - and extremely hot - squeaking noise, then relaxed into the kiss until their feet finally touched the ground. “You’re mine. And don’t you ever forget it.”
Tim’s smirk finally melted into an honest smile. “Like I ever could.”